New York Times
By STEVEN GREENHOUSE
Published: February 13, 2012

Apple’s announcement on Monday that an outside monitoring group, the Fair Labor Association, has begun inspecting its suppliers’ factories in China rekindled a debate over how effective the group has been in eliminating labor abuses.

The association was founded in 1999, by universities and nonprofit groups, along with Nike, Liz Claiborne and several other American apparel companies that said they were eager to eliminate workplace abuses; at that time, anti-sweatshop groups were pummeling American apparel companies for abuses in overseas factories they used.

Since its founding, the association has inspected more than 1,300 factories in Asia and Latin America, uncovering myriad violations. But despite these successes, many labor advocates say its efforts have barely made a dent in improving working conditions.

“The Fair Labor Association is largely a fig leaf,” said Jeff Ballinger, director of Press for Change, a labor rights group. “There’s all this rhetoric from corporate social responsibility people and the big companies that they want to improve labor standards, but all the pressure seems to be going the other direction — they’re trying to force prices down.”

Still, officials with the group — whose membership includes 34 companies, nearly 200 universities and more than 1,000 college logo licensees — say it has helped ferret out some of the worst abuses, whether in China or El Salvador.

Jorge Perez-Lopez, the association’s executive director, said it had made major strides, largely eliminating child labor at factories in China and Latin America and mostly ending an improper discriminatory practice at Latin American factories in which female applicants systematically underwent pregnancy tests and were not hired if they were pregnant.

At its founding, the idea was that the group, which had the enthusiastic backing and blessing of President Bill Clinton, would set a floor to what many said was an unpleasant race to the bottom in which many American companies rushed to find low-cost suppliers in China, Bangladesh and other countries.

But in those early days, it was criticized by numerous labor unions and anti-sweatshop advocates as toothless and too cozy with its corporate members. Many of the objections made then were repeated Monday after Apple’s announcement.